myth for angelica

I preferred sleep because I was free. I was haunted during the day, but in sleep I went elsewhere. I willed the walls to move. I had companionship. I saw the trees grow back in my dreams and the butterflies return.

I was surprised to see Rebecca alone at the meeting tables of the prison when she finally came to visit me. She looked so narrow without Pearl or my mother next beside. She had her hands folded. She was always so serious.

But those long spidery arms embracing brought tears to my eyes, though I wouldn’t want to show her. We do not cry together, she and I. She told me about the proliferation of figures that had been seen circling the town. Were they ghosts, or were they sick? Whenever the grass men came to bring them back to work, they would shrug tentatively into the trees and the men couldn’t keep track of them.

Rebecca was caring for the house and the influx of our community of workers staying there. My mother was sick, so she spent many hours a day with her. Rebecca was beginning to suspect that knew that one day she would return to find the house was condemned. There were just not enough people to be there for the daily inspection - and the grass men would take that over too. And Pearl - Rebecca added - had married an official.

“What about the baby?” I asked.

Hushed, she replied,“ No one seems to know where the baby is. It’s her secret. She will not see me. She will not talk to me. something came over her. I don’t know if she has a plan or if she has changed altogether.”

Sweetie did not yet return. I think about her, like a picture: whole. Smiling, with her two true hands when the sun came out - her walking through the trees when our town was forest.

I was led out early in the morning to be judged. It was dark. The fields were so bare they looked like old dish rags, as desperate as something lost.

I had dreamed that I climbed a tree to the sky and I could see all of this charade from far above.

The sky, the sky. I looked at the sky because that was the only thing I recognized. Every building had transformed. Every face I walked by was tense and grieved. This whole world is sad, and the only thing I could think to do was look up and laugh at the absurdity. “I will wake up from this. No?” Laughing is the only thing the men can’t understand. To think that once the dogs used to twirl in circles before they ate. That we laughed because we spent five hours driving to the beach and forgot the sunscreen. To think the children swam. In the darkness of autumn I could not help but laugh at those memories - because of the terror I faced.

Yet there was something there. I can’t describe it, but it seemed to rain down from the sky, like the last stars of morning were so many white green flowers with nectar.

They wouldn’t kill me. I was too young. I could work still. It would be a waste. I was sentenced to working the ovens, the most difficult and dangerous job. Better to work until I could no longer, instead of locking an able body up.

Something was happening, though, because out of the crowd of people going to work, came my mother and she was singing a song I recognized.